Nvidia Readies Nine DirectX 10 GPUs.

Following the release of the GeForce 8800 graphics processing unit (GPU), the world’s first and yet the only DirectX 10-compatible graphics chip, Nvidia Corp. said it would unveil nine more GeForce 8 architecture-based graphics processors eventually.

“G80 is just the first of the G8x family. And there are many other G8x families, probably nine others. We’re going to… all the numbers in between. So, the [GeForce 8800] GPU is designed to be scalable in architecture. And our engineers are very, very rapidly and very hard at work in building all kinds of products derived from the G8x family,” said Jen Hsen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive officer, during a conference call with analysts.

Mr. Huang did not unveil peculiarities or specifications of the forthcoming chips, however, the company’s chief financial officer Marvin Burkett said that in a year from then [mid-November, 2006] above 50% of Nvidia’s desktop product mix would be the GeForce 8-series products.

Typically graphics processors developers design one or two chips to serve the high-end market, one or two products for mainstream graphics cards and another one for the entry-level graphics boards. However, the actual number of product versions on the market is usually much higher compared to the amount of chip models.

Produced using 90nm process technology, Nvidia’s GeForce 8800-series graphics chip features 681 million transistors, an unprecedented number to date. Going away from traditional pixel shader and vertex shader processors, Nvidia introduced the so-called unified shader architecture, where an array of up to 128 arithmetic logic units – which Nvidia calls as stream processors – can be assigned for either vertex, geometry or pixel shaders. In order to further boost performance in various graphics applications, Nvidia has widened memory interface of the new chip to 320-bit and 384-bit from 256-bit on previous-generation products.